Illinois LED pioneers receive Draper Prize

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Professor Emeritus Nick Holonyak Jr. and two of his former students are among the five pioneers of LED technology honored with the 2015 Draper Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in engineering.

Holonyak is credited with the development of the first practical light-emitting diode, or LED, in 1962.

LEDs now are commonly used on items ranging from instrument panels to traffic signals to flashlights. The Draper Prize announcement cited LEDs' ability to "produce the greatest amount of light for the energy used, and have the longest lifetime of any lighting source available."

Professor Emeritus Nick Holonyak, Jr. and two of his former students are among the five pioneers of LED technology honored with the 2015 Draper Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in engineering.

Holonyak (BSEE '50, MSEE ’51, PhD ’54), Illinois alumni Russell Dupuis (BSEE '70, MSEE '71, PhD '73) and George Craford (who earned master's and doctoral degrees in physics in 1963 and 1967, respectively), were among five innovators honored by the National Academy of Engineering, which administers the $500,000 prize sponsored by Draper Laboratory.

Nick Holonyak, Jr

Holonyak is credited with the development of the first practical light-emitting diode, or LED, in 1962. One of the earliest researchers in semiconductor materials and devices, Holonyak is a pioneer in the field of optoelectronics, devices that convert electricity into light or vice versa.

LEDs now are commonly used on items ranging from instrument panels to traffic signals to flashlights. The Draper Prize announcement cited LEDs’ ability to “produce the greatest amount of light for the energy used, and have the longest lifetime of any lighting source available.”

At Illinois, Holonyak holds the John Bardeen Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics. The chair was endowed by the Sony Corp. of Tokyo in recognition of two-time Nobel Prize winner John Bardeen, also an Illinois faculty member in both electrical engineering and physics. Holonyak, Bardeen’s first graduate student, earned his doctorate at Illinois in 1954, and the two worked closely until Bardeen’s death in 1991.

From left: Russ Dupuis, George Craford, and Nick Holonyak Jr. are pictured with then-President George W. Bush when they accepted the U.S. National Medal of Technology for their work on the light-emitting diode.

Holonyak has continued to redefine optoelectronic technology throughout his career. In addition to LEDs, his innovation contributed to household dimmer switches, lasers that run CD and DVD players and fiber-optic communication.

Among Holonyak’s numerous awards are the Lemelson-MIT Prize (2004), the Global Energy Prize from Russia (2003), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Medal of Honor (2003), the U.S. National Medal of Technology (2002), the Japan Prize (1995), the National Academy of Sciences’ Award for the Industrial Application of Science (1993), the Optical Society’s Charles Hard Townes Award (1992) and the U.S. National Medal of Science (1990).

Winners of the 2015 Draper Prize, including Chancellor Phyllis Wise, who accepted the award on behalf of Professor Emeritus Nick Holonyak Jr.

“Great engineers imagine new things – and build them,” said Draper Laboratory President and CEO Kaigham J. Gabriel in a statement. “These LED pioneers created technologies that brought new light to our lives, spawning an industry that today boasts hundreds of thousands of jobs while making energy consumption more efficient.”